Archive | 2003

Extensive testing by Paul McNett seems to indicate that:

• VFP running under Wine locks tables and records properly,
  
• Multiple instances of VFP or other applications under the same instance of Wine respect each other’s locks,
  
• VFP clients on Windows can properly lock records and files on a Samba share or a native Windows share,
  
• VFP clients under Wine do respect locking when sharing files via NFS,
  
• VFP clients running under Wine will not see locks on SMB (Samba or Windows) shares because the outgoing SMBClient does not understand locks.

1. Consider moving to client-server, which eliminates all the locking issues, and gives you increased scalability, reliability and other – ilities, OR:
   
2. Put the DBF files on a Samba share, and access them via SMB (the native networking) from Windows clients, and via NFS from the Linux clients.

With the rich assortment of data servers available for Linux, I’m inclined to strategy #1 for new systems, but strategy #2 for existing DBF-based systems, to simplify the transition. Once the existing systems were working without a hitch under plan #2, I’d propose plan #1 for the next major upgrade of the system.

Paul McNett has been leading the charge to get VFP working on Linux. Here’s his website, and here’s an article he recently published in FoxTalk. There are still some limitations, like the locking issues in the last post, but there are work-arounds to those, too (using client-server data rather than local files), but the Wine project is still in alpha and the progress is exciting.

Click the little picture on the right for a large (1600×1200, 320kb) screen shot of VFP running on the Linux desktop.